Midwives have existed since the
beginning of humanity. Why, then, is it so difficult to find a midwife in America?
What events occured between the mid 1800's until the present day which nearly made
midwifery extinct in America? And why are more families now looking into homebirth as a
refuge from hospital care?Home Sweet Homebirth
provides the answers. Interviews with noted doctors, historians and midwives. Very
interesting and informative video.

WASHINGTON, May 12 - The National Environmental Trust (NET) and eleven national consumer,
health, religious, and environmental groups today called on the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and manufacturers to make all plastic food containers, including baby
bottles, safer for children. Their request comes in response to new scientific research
showing higher levels of bisphenol-A leaching from clear plastic baby bottles made of
polycarbonate plastic.
Recent studies on bisphenol-A (BPA) found health effects in laboratory animals, even when
tiny levels of the chemical were present. Studies on the migration, or leaching, of BPA
out of polycarbonate baby bottles suggest that babies could be well over safety limits
based on levels at which effects were seen in animals.

"Baby bottles shouldn't release any chemical-let alone one
that has been shown to function in the body like the hormone estrogen," said Philip
E. Clapp, President of National Environmental Trust. "A young baby's body is rapidly
developing in response to tiny, perfectly-timed hormonal signals. We have no way of
knowing the subtle ways that an artificial hormone-like substance, like bisphenol-A, can
interfere with that development."

A newly-identified study released at the press conference from
the peer-reviewed Journal of Health Science by Dr. Koji Arizono and other researchers from
the Prefectural University of Kumamoto and University of Nagasaki, Japan, used Solid-Phase
Microextraction, an extremely sensitive method of detecting and measuring small
concentrationsˇas low as 0.1 part per billion-of BPA in water and in food.
Additional tests on polycarbonate tableware typically used in Japanese primary schools
also indicated that BPA will leach into hot liquids and confirmed that worn, scratched
polycarbonate shows greater leaching.

Dr. Arizono's results confirmed that polycarbonate material
leaches BPA at high heat-also observed by Consumers Union in a May 1999 study reported in
Consumer Reports and a in a 1997 U.S. FDA study. But the results also show leaching of BPA
from polycarbonate at much lower temperaturesˇas low as 60 degrees C.

Dr. Frederick Vom Saal, professor of biology at the University of
Missouri, has studied the health effects of extremely low doses of bisphenol-A in
laboratory mice. As he told the ABC-TV news program, 20/20, "We've seen a wide
variety of damage in the offspring when we feed this to pregnant female mice. We have the
threat of a chemical that in an adult is not necessarily harmful, but in a developing
fetus or a newborn poses a very unique and very serious danger. We're talking about damage
in organs that sometimes is difficult to pinpoint but could have very serious health
consequences, nonetheless."
NET also released an analysis of industry-sponsored studies that have attempted to
disprove Dr. vom Saal's studies. All three industry studies-a study commissioned by the
Society for the Plastics Industry; a study performed by Zeneca, Inc., a large chemical
company; and a study commissioned by the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology-were
found by independent scientists and statisticians to be either flawed in execution or to
generate results that appear to corroborate rather than disprove vom Saal's findings.
Chemical & Engineering News reported in their May 10, 1999, issue that a National
Institute for Environmental Health Sciences statistician, Joseph K. Haseman, reanalyzed
one industry study and found that, contrary to the studyÝs stated conclusions, he found
the study actually shows a positive effect, specifically "an increase in prostate
weight with bisphenol-A treatment" (p. 29).

The petition calls on FDA to promptly identify all ingredients
used to formulate plastic food containers that may migrate into foods to which children
are routinely exposed; implement a strategy that will eliminate or greatly reduce
children's exposure to all such plastic food packaging ingredients; permit the use of
migrating ingredients only after manufacturers provide substantial affirmative evidence of
safety; and work with other federal agencies to implement a scientific investigation into
the low dose effects of migrating ingredients in plastic food packaging.

According to NET's Clapp, the FDA has not yet recognized a
problem with bisphenol-A because its regulatory approach has not kept up with the emerging
science on chemicals that interfere with the hormone system.